ted forms discernible enough to Romola, who know them well,--the
triumphant Bacchus, with his clusters and his vine-clad spear, clasping
the crowned Ariadne; the Loves showering roses, the wreathed vessel, the
cunning-eyed dolphins, and the rippled sea: all encircled by a flowery
border, like a bower of paradise. Romola looked at the familiar images
with new bitterness and repulsion: they seemed a more pitiable mockery
than ever on this chill morning, when she had waked up to wander in
loneliness. They had been no tomb of sorrow, but a lying screen.
Foolish Ariadne! with her gaze of love, as if that bright face, with its
hyacinthine curls like tendrils among the vines, held the deep secret of
her life!

"Ariadne is wonderfully transformed," thought Romola. "She would look
strange among the vines and the roses now."

She took up the mirror, and looked at herself once more. But the sight
was so startling in this morning light that she laid it down again, with
a sense of shrinking almost as strong as that with which she had turned
from the joyous Ariadne. The recognition of her own face, with the cowl
about it, brought back the dread lest she should be drawn at last into
fellowship with some wretched superstition--into the company of the
howling fanatics and weeping nuns who had been her contempt from
childhood till now. She thrust the key into the tabernacle hurriedly:
hurriedly she opened it, and took out the crucifix, without looking at
it; then, with trembling fingers, she passed a cord through the little
ring, hung the crucifix round her neck, and hid it in the bosom of her
mantle. "For Dino's sake," she said to herself. Still there were the
letters to be written which Maso was to carry back from Bologna. They
were very brief. The first said--

"Tito, my love for you is dead; and therefore, so far as I was yours, I
too am dead. Do not try to put in force any laws for the sake of
fetching me back: that would bring you no happiness. The Romola you
married can never return. I need explain nothing to you after the words
I uttered to you the last time we spoke long together. If you supposed
them to be words of transient anger, you will know now that they were
the sign of an irreversible change.

"I think you will fulfil my wish that my bridal chest should be sent to
my godfather, who gave it me. It contains my wedding-clothes and the
portraits and other relics of my father and mother."

She folded the r